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Taking the Fight for Workplace Safety to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Submitted by fjgallagher on Fri, 04/20/2012 - 12:01

Every year, right around 5,000 Americans go to work in the morning, just like they always do, expecting to come home at night.

But they don't.

Instead they were killed on the job. You can see the litany of statistics and read the stories behind these numbers, told in the terse shorthand of the bureaucratic patois, here. Just click on any given link to dive right in.

The saddest part is, though, that a lot of these workplace tragedies could have had a different ending. They didn't, in large part because far too many of our national policy makers, prodded by organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, continue to pursue some mythical, "pro-business" ethos that defines the American worker as just another resource that can be replaced quickly and, most important, cheaply.

This is not mere rhetoric. It is a fact, supported by empirical data presented most recently in a report from the non-partisan, federal Government Accountability Office. The disturbing truth is, you can lay the responsibility for hundreds, if not thousands, of workplace fatalities squarely at the front door of organizations like the Chamber, who spend a considerable amount of time and money throwing up as many procederal and political roadblocks to common-sense workplace safety rules as their well-shod K Street lobbyists can dream up.

The GAO report found that, thanks to the delaying tactics employed by the Chamber and their fellow travellers, the approval process for the average OSHA rule now stretches to nearly 8 years.

So, today at noon, a coalition of workplace incident survivors and families who lost loved ones on the job, working Americans and workplace safety advocates, will gather outside Chamber headquarters in Washington, D.C. to highlight the real-life, human consequences of the Chamber's tactics.

We'll be tweeting live updates from the event in real time, as they occur, and posting them to our Facebook page as well. You can receive them by following us on Twitter, @nationalcosh, or on our Facebook page here. There may also be a live stream of the event, too. If there is, we'll put the location out on our Facebook and Twitter feeds as well.